Re: 2011 OOTS Ornament + New CafePress Shirts, Laptop Skins, etc.

Originally Posted by INDYSTAR188

Giant,

I ordered some merchandise (both for me and my daughter). I love the art work, quotes are hilarious, read the comic - generally I'm a huge fan of your stuff. But I have to tell you it's hard to bring myself to pay $22-30 dollars for a printed t-shirt. I appreciate that your trying to make money and I'm sure cafepress requires a large sum of that money too, I just thought I would post that if the shirts were in the $15 - 20 dollar range I would buy more of them.

Thanks for your time and happy holidays!

Thank you for your order, and I understand. The thing is, CafePress charges me between $16-$30 for a shirt to begin with. The only portion of those t-shirt prices which actually comes to me is the last $6 or $7, depending on the design and product. This is because CafePress is a Print-on-Demand printer, which means the per-unit cost is high compared to a bulk printer. So I'm actually incapable of lowering the price to $15 for any shirt (or $20 for all but the most basic tees) without simply not offering them at all.

The reason I use them anyway is that because they are P.O.D., I don't need to pay them upfront in order for them to make the shirts. They simply charge the amount listed, then produce the shirt and send me a portion. Also, it allows me to experiment with designs and/or shirt styles that may end up being less popular without any risk that I will end up with a huge financial loss (not to mention a warehouse full of unwanted stuff).

By way of contrast, we sell bulk printed tees at Ookoodook, which you will see are exactly in the $15-20 range...but you'll also notice that there are only a handful of designs and each is available on exactly one style of t-shirt. It's also hard to predict what sizes to stock; some of those shirts have sold out of one size while having dozens of another left. As much as I would like to be able to lower the prices, unfortunately it's not really viable to switch to bulk printing for all of my t-shirt needs.